| In autumn 1911 Italy invaded Ottoman Libya, sparking a complex thirty-two year conflict whose roots stretched all the way back to the Congresses of Berlin and which would only end with Italy's expulsion during World War II. From the very beginning of the conflict, representations and historical accounts of the war were largely products of censorious Italian propaganda campaigns and misinformation. Subsequent historical scholarship on the conflict---both Italian, Libyan, and otherwise- has tended to either accentuate the Italian perspective or else provide partial and incomplete coverage of the conflict. This study argues that, in effect, the whole story of the Italian-Libyan conflict is yet to be told. One of the major purposes of this work is to rectify this situation and to provide as full an account of the history of the conflict as possible. Through presentation and analysis of Italian archival material, firsthand memoirs and eyewitness accounts, as well as a broad range of historical scholarship, this dissertation investigates the complex historical process which led to the war and its various consequences. However, the project approaches this history from a Libyan perspective. This dissertation argues that the Italian intervention in Libya was primarily a demographic- economic one and that this primary motivation was the seizure of land and resources from the Libyan people, who were often cruelly dispensed with as unnecessary impediments to this colonial expropriation. |
